Analyzing stress-induced behavior of passengers in PT infrastructures
As part of the scientific project IANUS we used a multidisciplinary approach comprising complementary methods to investigate stress-related behaviour of specific target groups. The aim of the project was to identify stress-inducing factors in transport infrastructures and their effects on navigation behaviour of passengers as well as the passengers’ strategies of gathering information and coping with stress. In this contribution, we focus on a particular method we used in this multi-disciplinary approach: the observation and analysis of spatio-temporal movement patterns of test subjects. We introduce the method, illustrate selected results and demonstrate how the results were consolidated with data obtained by the complementary methods in the project.
Results from this study and similar research settings confirm that observations are a valuable extension for investigating behaviour in especially complex situations. In particular, the semi-automated shadowing approach presented in this paper allows collecting a broad range of location- and time-related data for comprehensively analysing spatio-temporal behaviour patterns of pedestrians in different contexts. For tracking individual pedestrians within an infrastructure, semi-automated shadowing provides very good results especially in combination with complementary empirical methods for investigating pedestrian spatio-temporal behaviour.